The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  The shiny thing spun on the end of the silver chain, and the green-eyed baby watched it, and I watched it.

  After that there was darkness, with me standing in the middle of it quite still, and cold, cold, cold!

  Virgie’s voice came through the darkness, calm, casual, as though none of it mattered at all.

  “I’ve remembered who it is you made me think of, Mr. Goat,” she said. “I’m afraid I was rather rude that day on Mars, but the resemblance puzzled me. Look.”

  A white object came into my shell of ice and blackness. It was a strong white hand, reddened across the knuckles with work, holding something in the palm. Something that burned with a clear, terrible light of its own. Her voice went on, so very quietly.

  “This locket, Mr. Goat. It’s ancient. Over three hundred years old. It belonged to an ancestor of mine, and the family has kept it ever since. It’s rather a lovely story. She married a young spaceman. In those days, of course, space flight was still new and dangerous, and this young man loved it as much as he did his wife. His name was Stephen Vance. That’s his picture. That’s why I thought I had seen you somewhere before, and why I asked your name. I think the resemblance is quite striking, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”

  “The girl is his wife, and of course, the original owner of the locket. He called her Missy. It’s engraved on the back of the locket. Anyway, he had a chance to make the first flight from Mars to Jupiter, and Missy knew how much it meant to him. She knew that something of him would die if he didn’t go, and so she let him. He didn’t know how soon the baby they’d both wanted so much would arrive, for she didn’t tell him that. Because she knew he wouldn’t go if she did.

  “So Stephen had two lockets made, this one and another just like it. He told her they’d make a link between them, he and Missy, that nothing could break. Sometime, somehow, he’d come back to her, no matter what happened. Then he went to Jupiter. He died there. His ship was never found.

  “But Missy went on wearing the locket and praying. And when she died she gave it to her daughter. It grew into a sort of family tradition. That’s why I have it now.”

  Her voice trailed off, drowsily, with a faint note of surprise. Her hand and the locket went away, and there was a great stillness all around me, a great peace.

  I brought my arms up across my face. I stiffened, and I tried to say something, words I used to say a long, long time ago. They wouldn’t come. They won’t, when you go into the Beyond Place.

  I took my hands away, and I could see again. I didn’t touch the locket around my neck. I could feel it against my breast, like the cold of space, searing me.

  Virgie lay at my feet. She still held the baby in the bend of one arm. Its round brown face was turned to hers, smiling a little. Brad lay beside them, with one arm flung across them both.

  The locket lay on the gentle curve of Virgie’s breast, face up, still open, rising and falling slowly to the lift of her breathing.

  They don’t suffer. Remember that. They don’t suffer. They don’t even know. They sleep, and their dreams are happy. Remember, please! Not one of them has suffered, or been afraid.

  I stood alone in that silent ship. There were no stars beyond the port now, no little worlds riding the Belt. There was only a veil of light wrapped close around the ship, a soft web of green and purple and gold and blue spun on a shimmering gray woof that was not color at all, and held there with threads of scarlet.

  There was the familiar dimming of the electrics inside the ship. The people slept on the broad deck. I could hear their breathing, soft and slow and peaceful. My aura burned like a golden cloud around me, and inside it my body beat and pulsed with life.

  I looked down at the locket, at Missy’s face. If you’d told me. Oh Missy, if you’d only told me, I could have saved you!

  Virgie’s red hair, dark and straight and heavy in her white neck. Virgie’s smoke-gray eyes, half open and dreaming. Missy’s hair. Missy’s eyes.

  Mine. Part of my flesh, part of my bone, part of my blood. Part of the life that still beat and pulsed inside me.

  Three hundred years.

  “Oh, if I could only pray!” I thought.

  I knelt down beside her. I put out my hand. The golden light came out of the flesh and veiled her face. I took my hand away and got up, slowly. More slowly than Gallery fell when he died.

  The shimmer of the Veil was all through the ship, now. In the air, in every atom of its wood and metal. I moved in it, a shining golden thing, alive and young, in a silent, sleeping world.

  Three hundred years, and Missy was dead, and now the locket had brought her back.

  Did Judas feel like this when the rope tore the life out of him?

  But Judas died.

  I walked in the silence, wrapped in my golden cloud, and my heartbeats shook me like the blows of a man’s fist. A strong heart. A young, strong heart.

  The ship swerved slowly, drawn out of its arc of free fall toward Jupiter. The auxiliaries had not been cut in yet for the Belt. The Veil just closed around the hull and drew it, easily.

  It’s just an application of will-power. Teleportation, the strength of mind and thought amplified by the X-crystals and directed like a radio beam. The release of energy between the force of thought and the force of gravity causes the light, the visible thing that spacemen call the Veil. The hypnotic sleep-impulse is sent the same way, through the X-crystals on Astellar.

  Shirina says it’s a simple thing, a child’s trick, in its own space-time matrix. All it requires is a focal point to guide it, a special vibration it can follow like a torch in the void, such as the aura around flesh, human or not, that has bathed in the Cloud.

  A Judas goat, to lead the sheep to slaughter.

  I walked in my golden light. The pleasure of subtle energies pricked and flared across my skin. I was going home.

  And Missy was still alive. Three hundred years, and she was still alive. Her blood and mine, alive together in a girl named Virgie.

  And I was taking her to Astellar, the world its own dimension didn’t want.

  I guess it was the stopping of the current across my skin that roused me, half an eternity later. My aura had paled to its normal faintness. I heard the faint grating ring of metal on stone, and I knew the Queen of Jupiter had made her last landing. I was home.

  I was sitting on the edge of my own bunk. I didn’t know how I got there. I was holding my head on my clenched fists, and when I opened them my own locket fell out. There was blood on my palms.

  I got up and walked through the silence, through the hard impersonal glare of the electrics, to the nearest airlock, and went out.

  The Queen of Jupiter lay in a rounded cradle of rock, worn smooth. Back at the top of the chute the space doors were closed, and the last echo of the air pumps was dying away against the low roof of the cavern. The rock is a pale translucent green, carved and polished into beauty that stabs you breathless, no matter how many times you see it.

  Astellar is a little world, only about half the size of Vesta. Outside it’s nothing but black slag, without even a trace of mineral to attract a tramp miner. When they want to they can bend the light around it so that the finest spacescope can’t find it, and the same thought-force that makes the Veil can move Astellar where they wish it to go. Since traffic through the Belt has grown fairly heavy, they haven’t moved it much. They haven’t had to.

  I went across the cavern in the pale green light. There’s a wide ramp that goes up from the floor like the sweep of an angel’s wing. Flack was waiting for me near the foot of it, outlined in the faint gold of his aura.

  “Hi, Steve,” he said, and looked at the Queen of Jupiter with his queer gray eyes. His hair was as black as mine used to be, his skin space-burned dark and leathery. His eyes looked out of the darkness like pale spots of moonlight, faintly luminous and without a soul.

  I knew Flack before he became one of us, and I thought then that he was less human than the
Astellarians.

  “A good haul this time, Steve?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” I tried to get past him. He caught my arm.

  “Hey—what’s eating you?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  I shook him off. He smiled and stepped in front of me. A big man, as big as Gallery and a lot tougher, with a mind that could meet mine on an equal footing.

  “Don’t give me that, Stevie. Something’s—he-ey!” He pushed my chin up suddenly, and his pale eyes glowed and narrowed.

  “What’s this?” he said. “Tears?”

  He stared at me a minute, slack-jawed, and then he began to laugh. I hit him.

  3 Wages of Evil

  Flack went sprawling backward onto the lucent stone. I went by him up the curve of the ramp. I went fast, but it was already too late.

  The airlocks of the Queen of Jupiter opened behind me.

  I stopped. I stopped the way Gallery did in the blowing Martian sand, slowly, dragging weights on my feet. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to turn around, but there was nothing I could do about it. My body turned, by itself.

  Flack was on his feet again, leaning up against the carved green wall, looking at me. Blood ran out over his lip and down his chin. He got out a handkerchief and held it over his mouth, and his eyes never left me, pale and still and glowing. The golden aura made a halo round his dark head, like the painting of a saint.

  Beyond him the locks of the ship were open, and the people were coming out.

  In their niche on the fourth level of Astellar the X-crystals were pulsing from pale gray to a black as endless and alien as the Coal Sack. Behind them was a mind, kindly and gentle, thinking, and the human cargo of the Queen heard its thoughts.

  They came out of the locks, walking steadily but without haste. They formed into a loose column and came across the green translucent floor of the cavern and up the ramp. Walking easily, their breathing deep and quiet, their eyes half open and full of dreams.

  Up the long sweeping ribbon of pale green stone, past Flack, past me, and into the hall beyond. They didn’t see anything but their dreams. They smiled a little. They were happy, and not afraid.

  Virgie still carried the baby, drowsing in her arms, and Brad was still beside her. The locket had turned with her movements, hiding the pictures, showing me only its silver back.

  I watched them go. The hall beyond the ramp was gem-cut from milky crystal and inlaid with metals that came from another dimension, radioactive metals that filled the crystal walls and the air between them with softened, misty fire.

  They went slowly into, the veil of mist and fire, and were gone.

  Flack spoke softly. “Steve.”

  I turned back toward the sound of his voice. There was a strange blur over everything, but I could see the yellow glow of his aura, the dark strength of him outlined against the pale green rock. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t taken his cold light eyes away from me.

  I had left my mind naked, unguarded, and I knew before he spoke that Flack had read it.

  He spoke through his bruised lips.

  “You’re thinking you won’t go into the Cloud again, because of that girl,” he whispered. “You’re thinking there must be some way to save her. But there isn’t, and you wouldn’t save her if you could. And you’ll go into the Cloud again, Stevie. Twelve hours from now, when it’s time, you’ll walk into the Cloud with the rest of us. And do you know why?”

  His voice grew soft as the touch of a dove, with a sound of laughter under it.

  “Because you’re afraid to die, Stevie, just like the rest of us. Even me, Flack, the guy that never had a soul. I never believed in any god but myself and I love life. But sometimes I look at a corpse lying in the street of some human sinkhole and curse it with all my heart because it didn’t have to be afraid.

  “You’ll go into the Cloud, because the Cloud is all that keeps you alive. And you won’t care about the red-haired girl, Stevie. You wouldn’t care if it was Missy herself giving her life to you, because you’re afraid. We’re not human any longer, Steve. We’re gone beyond. We’ve sinned—sins there aren’t even any names for in this dimension. And no matter what we believe in, or deny, we’re afraid.

  “Afraid to die, Stevie. All of us. Afraid to die!”

  His words frightened me. I couldn’t forget them. I was remembering them even when I saw Shirina.

  “I’ve found a new dimension, Stevie,” Shirina said lazily. “A little one, between the Eighth and Ninth. It’s so little we missed it before. We’ll explore it, after the Cloud.”

  She led me in our favorite room. It was cut from a crystal so black and deep that it was like being in outer space, and if you looked long enough you could see strange nebulae, far off, and galaxies that never were except in dreams.

  “How long before it’s time?” I asked her.

  “An hour, perhaps less. Poor Stevie. It’ll be over soon, and you’ll forget.”

  Her mind touched mine gently, with an intimate sweetness and comfort far beyond the touch of hands. She’d been doing that for hours, soothing the fever and the pain out of my thoughts. I lay without moving, sprawled on a couch so soft it was like a cloud. I could see the glow and shimmer of Shirina against the darkness without turning my head.

  I don’t know how to describe Shirina. Physically she was close enough to humanity. The differences in structure were more subtle than mere shape. They were—well, they were right, and exotic, and beautiful in a way there aren’t any words for.

  She, and her race, had no need of clothing. Their lazy, sinuous bodies had a fleecy covering that wasn’t fur or feathers or tendrils but something of all three. They had no true color. They changed according to light, in an endless spectrum of loveliness that went far beyond the range you humans know.

  Now, in the dark, Shirina’s aura glowed like warm pearl. I could see her face, faintly, the queer peaked triangular bones covered with skin softer than a humming-bird’s breast, the dead-black, bottomless eyes, the crest of delicate antennae tipped with tiny balls of light like diamonds burning under gauze.

  Her thoughts clung around me gently. “There’s no need to worry, Stevie,” she was thinking. “The girl will go last. It’s all arranged. You will enter the Cloud first of all, and there won’t be the smallest vibration of her to touch you.”

  “But she’ll touch somebody, Shirina,” I groaned. “And it makes it all different, somehow, even with the others. Time doesn’t seem to mean much. She’s—she’s like my own kid.”

  Shirina answered aloud, patiently. “But she isn’t. Your daughter was born three hundred years ago. Three hundred years, that is, for your body. For you there isn’t any reckoning. Time is different in every dimension. We’ve spent a thousand years in some of them, and more than that.”

  Yes. I could remember those alien years. Dimensional walls are no barrier to thought. You lie under the X-crystals and watch them pulse from mist-gray to depthless black. Your mind is sucked out of you and projected along a tight beam of carefully planned vibration, and presently you’re in another space, another time.

  You can take over any body that pleases you, for as long as you want. You can go between planets, between suns, between galaxies, just by thinking about it. You can see things, do things, taste experiences that all the languages of our space-time continuum put together have no words for.

  Shirina and I had done a lot of wandering, a lot of seeing, and a lot of tasting. And the interlocking universes are infinite.

  “I can’t help worrying, Shirina,” I told her. “I don’t want to feel like this, but I can’t help it. Right now I’m human. Just plain Steve Vance of Beverly Hills, California, on the planet Earth. I can’t bear my memories.”

  My throat closed up. I was sick, and covered with cold sweat, and closer to going crazy than ever before in all my Satan-knows-how-many years.

  Shirina’s voice came through the darkness. It was like a bird-call, a flute, a ripple of water over stones, and like no
thing that any of you ever heard or ever will hear.

  “Stevie,” she said. “Listen to me. You’re not human any more. You haven’t been human since the first time you walked in the Cloud. You have no more contact with those people than they have with the beasts they raise for slaughter.”

  “But I can’t help remembering.”

  “All right. Remember, then. Remember how from birth you were different from other men. How you had to go on and out, to see things no man had ever seen before, to fight space itself with your heart and your ship and your two hands.”

  I could recall it. The first man to dare the Belt, the first man to see Jupiter blazing in his swarm of moons.

  “That’s why, when we caught you in the Veil and brought you to Astellar, we saved you from the Cloud. You had something rare—a strength, a sweep of vision and desire. You could give us something we wanted, an easier contact with human ships. And in return, we gave you life and freedom.”

  She paused, and added softly, “And myself, Stevie.”

  “Shirina!” A lot of things met and mingled in our thoughts. Emotions born of alien bodies we had shared. Memories of battle and beauty, of terror and love, under suns that never burned afterward, even in one’s dreams. I can’t explain it. There aren’t any words.

  “Shirina, help me!”

  Shirina’s mind cradled mine like a mother’s arms.

  “You weren’t to blame in the beginning, Stevie. We did it to you under hypnosis, so that your brain could assimilate the change gradually, without shock. I led you myself into our world, like someone leading a child, and when you were finally freed, much time had passed. You had gone beyond humanity. Far beyond.”

  “I could have stopped. I could have refused to go into the Cloud again, when I knew what it was. I could have refused to be a Judas goat, leading the sheep to slaughter.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”